Well I remember when X Rebirth came out and there were (and still are) people on their forums saying that everyone else is crazy for not expecting the game to be shit at release and fixed up later with patches. And furthermore, no one should have believed the pre-release advertising anyway. But it's a great game!

Now Witcher 3 is obviously a great game, downgraded graphics or not, but that doesn't make it right for CDPR to lie and then switch up stories conveniently when they are caught.

No one is questioning their long term support for their games or how well they treat their customers.

That still doesn't make it alright to say in one interview that all you did was 'optimization' and then a few weeks later come out with a different story. Even if that different story is the truth this time.

The reason people are harder on you than other developers, is because you've shown yourself to be capable and willing to operate at a higher standard. If you had come out and said this before, no one would have solid grounds to complain.

Combat has always been my biggest gripe with Gal Civ games and GC3 isn't that much better than it's predecessor in that regard.

I will never understand the weird viewpoint of some of the Gal Civ die hards that somehow better combat will infringe on the game and somehow make it less enjoyable.

It certainly is better to have bad combat from Stardock's POV, it's way cheaper from a dev standpoint to do that than to do something interesting like real time combat. And three weapon types only sure is easier as well. Rock paper scissors and all that.

I still haven't finished my second playthrough of Witcher 2 yet and I honestly have way too many games on my plate right now.

I need some kind of gaming chamber that sits outside of the normal space-time continuum. Then I can just binge for a few days of non-stop gaming while only having had maybe an hour pass in the real world.

Alamar wrote on May 9, 2015, 19:15:Was just checking this game out earlier... Played some Strike Suit Zero, but the crashes are making me want to say 'fuck it'... Also realized my Origin acct has a few Wing Commanders, so I may give that a whirl...

Don't much care for Elite's current price, so was thinking about looking for alternatives, but now I can't pick up a key (on ebay or wherever), as I can't be sure it's not one linked to this announcement... The extra key isn't meant for extra people; just convenience... But they'll be sold... A lot...

jacobvandy wrote on May 9, 2015, 04:47:Well, Steam is getting their cut from copies sold through them. And I'm sure they'd rather have people using Steam to access their game than not. It's pretty well-known among indie devs that free keys is a solid perk they offer compared to other services that may charge you a fee and/or have a limit on how many free ones you get. They don't charge for activation of Steamworks games sold through retail or other digital stores, either. They serve dozens of petabytes of data per week... All 300+ thousand of those pre-Steam Elite players would have to download the game at once to even make a blip. This is how they grow the user base; eating some bandwidth costs here and there is more than made up for by attracting more people that will stick around and buy stuff, etc.

Do you have a source for this? It makes sense as Valve are clearly determined to get people on to their service but I'd like to know for sure. I'd be very surprised if Frontier are paying Valve the full 30%.

It's a weird thing, but most people assume things about Steam and Valve without actually going to the Steam page for developers and reading what they offer. Steam really seems to be the best game in town when it comes to pricing and all the perks that devs get for free from them.

The EVE crowd are not your typical MMO crowd though. They would be closer to the competitive multiplayer crowd, except that they generally have more patience.

For a game like the original EQ, there were a number of different factors that contributed to what made it so appealing. There was nothing else like it at the time is the first thing.

The difficulty and setup of the game game world meant that soloing was extremely unprofitable. It didn't just encourage group play, it demanded it.

At the time, social networking was nowhere near as popular as it is today (if you could even say it existed apart from MSN Messenger and ICQ in the mainstream). EQ combined social networking with a vast open world and stuff for you to do with the people you were chatting to.

Finally, the spontaneous and unforseen situations which could happen in that kind of environment are impossible to create in today's MMOs, precisely because they are all so much about hand-holding and theme parking. Anyone who remembers the infamous trains in the Estate of Unrest would get what I'm talking about.

The modern MMO is so much about tightly controlling the player experience, that there is no way to revisit those days.

As a consequence, even the new ones which come out and claim to be about recapturing that same magic, can't do it. It wasn't just a matter of harsh gameplay that demanded grouping, it was about the unfettered nature of the game world and how that allowed so many awesome moments to happen naturally.

Krovven wrote on Apr 28, 2015, 17:38:I just hope that the mouse control is better and snap-to-aim isn't a requirement. I ended up using the gamepad to play this because I couldn't stand that the crosshair would snap to chests when I was aiming at heads, using the mouse.

I'm not 100% sure, but couldn't you turn that off?

If there was I missed it. I forget what the options were. All I know is after experimenting with both I went with gamepad.

of course you can turn it off... but some people just want to bitch

Bitching about controllers is now the in thing. I still find people who say Arkham games are easier with a controller to be pretty funny.